Ellison started his second novel in 1954 and still hadn't completed it by his death in 1994. He claimed at one point that part of the manuscript was lost in a 1967 fire, but he later told a friend in a letter that it was only revisions to the manuscript that had been lost. Whatever the reasons, the self-confessed "fast writer, but...slow worker"never could pull the novel together.

What it's about: Set in the frame of a deathbed vigil, the story is a gripping multigenerational saga centered on the assassination of the controversial, race-baiting U.S. senator Adam Sunraider, who’s being tended to by “Daddy” Hickman, the elderly black jazz musician turned preacher who raised the orphan Sunraider as a light-skinned black in rural Georgia. Presented in their unexpurgated, provisional state, the narrative sequences form a deeply poetic, moving, and profoundly entertaining book, brimming with humor and tension, composed in Ellison’s magical jazz-inspired prose style and marked by his incomparable ear for vernacular speech. (from Modern Library)

Eight months before his first novel was published, Ellison told a friend he was already starting on his second book so that if his first one was a dud, he'd be too busy to think about it.Invisible Man has been hailed as an American classic and won the National Book Award in 1953.